january 18, 2009: per se lunch

Celery Root Veloute/black truffle "pain perdu"

Oysters and Pearls/sabayon of pearl tapioca with island creek oysters anad sterling white sturgeon caviar

White Truffle Oil Infused Custard/ragout of black winter truffles (dcm)
Extra Virgin Olive Oil Infused Custard/blood orange + ginko nut (led)

Salad of Hawaiian Hearts of Peach Palm/red bunch radishes, compressed granny smith apples, watercress, violet mustard

Daurade Royale Cuite a L'Huile D'Olive/black trumpet mushrooms, salsify, petit lettuces with red wine syrup

Macaroni and Cheese/butter poached nova scotia lobster, parmesan crisp, creamy lobster broth and mascarpone orzo

Za'atar Scented Panisse/romaine lettuce hearts, raita, smoked eggplant puree

French Onion Soup/alp drackloch

Garden Thyme-infused Ice Cream/chocolate "tuile", fleur de sel, moulin des penitents extra virgin olive oil (led)

Sorbet a L'Huile D'Olive/chocolate pudding, nicoise olive oil (dcm)

Cranberry Sorbet/granny smith apple parisienne, candied apple

Per Se Float/compressed pineapple, vanilla custard, gingerbread "crouton" with pineapple-ginger soda

Coffee and Doughnuts/cinnamon sugared doughnuts with cappuccino semifreddo

Bombe au Pamplemousse/chocolate roulade, manjari chocolate moussee, grapefruit curd, pink grapefruit ice cream (dcm)

Mint Chocolate Chip/chocolate dacquoise, crystallized mint, chocolate tuile, mint chocolate chip ice cream (led)

assortment of migniardises including: nougat, caramels, pulled sugar candy, amadei+ valrhona filled chocolates


for the record:

1. Michael Ruhlman was totally right about the soups. The celery root veloute was the stuff of dreams.

2. We arrived to one of the best tables in the house, a letter from TK himself, and complimentary champagne.

3. Yes, I requested the zaatar panisse.

4. We ate FOR FOUR HOURS.

5. Jonathan came out to say hi.

6. The kitchen was immaculate in a way that I cannot possibly hope to describe.

eating: bad for you

It's a dangerous world out there these days. After receiving a series of complaints from diners feeling "unwell" Heston Blumenthal has temporarily closed the Fat Duck (via diners journal).

And, last week, Payard failed health inspections and was shut down for a couple days.

For a bit of good restaurant news via SF Eater, my favorite local restaurant Aziza was re-reviewed by the Bauer and given a 3.5 star rating. Mourad's food is so special, and the cocktail menu is always an exercise in interesting pairings. I find it interesting that MB comments on the white plates because, for me (unless it's changed recently) it's the beautiful Heath plates that I recall.

While there are some things I'd love to see updated, like the pastry bag squeeze-piles of dips for the flatbread mezze, the flatbread itself is pillowy and perfect, and my main courses have always been interesting, flavorful and complex.

MB's review was less flowery than usual, but leaves such nuggets as the following: "a neat pile of berries and a smear of purple sauce resembling the tail of a comet. " Oy.

bklyn: believing the hype?

There's a sign over the Kosciuszko Bridge that brings you to the Brooklyn part of the BQE, and since traffic is likely crawling, you have ample opportunity to read it.

Believe the Hype!

Exclamation point included.

Reading the recent New York Times article about artisan slow food production in Brooklyn, and the quasi-fallout in follow-up Q&A responses (all found on the excellent Diners Journal blog) made me think of that sign.

My neighborhood, northmost Brooklyn, was an enclave of Polish shops and restaurants, where old men filled quiet park benches and you could buy 99 cent bars of Milke chocolate at the Key Foods. Twenty blocks south, the main drag of Bedford was already littered with foodie nooks like the Bedford Cheese shop mentioned in the original
NYT article. Brooklyn Lager was on tap in every bar, and the brewery offered frequent tours and tastings. Hipsters nestled in an uneasy corridor of a southside Williamsburg home to latins and Orthodox Jews. Further south still, Spike Lee's neighborhood was once again a safe place to live and I skirted my bicycle across the oceans, down a slight stretch of Flatbush and around Prospect Park, sometimes grabbing a coffee from Gorilla Coffee and lingering in Park Slope before skirting home through Bed-Stuy.



In those days Brooklyn still had pockets of old-time, authentic cultural traditions, though in my own neighborhood I had the vague sense that it was all being edged out. Institutions like Peter Luger's sat hulking under the train tracks while entrepreneurs named their bars after the institutions formerly occupying the space (Pete's Candy Store, Union Pool). Even the "new" Brooklyn feels old, though maybe that's just all the brick buildings. I wasn't surprised by the Times article. It's been 8 years, if not more, in the making, for North Brooklyn. And I wasn't surprised by the response, a mix of people genuinely excited, and other pointing out, patiently and not-so-much, that the bklyn of hype need not forget its own histories.

i heart david chang

scoping out places to go in new york, and i see chang now has a bakery in his momofuku empire. cakes, shakes, cookes, pretty normal things, but his list of ice cream toppings?

brown butter solids

he's also got a cookie called compost cookie and a pie called crack pie...

anyone out there been to his bakery?

also, aside from old favorites doughnut plant (which is so close to il laboratorio del gelato i might as well show my mom), dean and deluca, broadway panhandler, and birdbath, where to go?

i have a reservation at per se for my trip to nyc in january! there is a slight chance my mom will say she's not paying THAT much money to eat lunch, and we won't go after all, but i hope not because she basically said if i could get us a resy, we could go.

they were actually the sweetest, nicest people to talk to on the phone. the reservationist i got was so happy i lived in sf, which led to to confess, "yeah i work in the industry, actually at {the restaurant} and all you guys have been coming in lately, jonathan was in a while back, hollingsworth was just in, etc, etc"

they asked up front about any dietary restrictions, etc. i said we might get the vegetables menu, because we're both picky about meat, and that was it. it's great that they ask. i don't think they ask at my restaurant. some people overprepare and tell the reservationist, but then we get lactose-intolerant vegetarians who claim to be vegan and then ask to have the chocolate dessert with ice cream (dairy + eggs).

the big question, though...what am i gonna wear?

UPDATE: the mom says yes. i'm going to per se! ::does little dance around kitchen while banging out another round of marshmallows::

...

sometimes i feel so happy
sometimes i feel so sad
sometimes i feel so happy
but mostly you just make me mad
baby you just make me mad

It snows in my mind and in the town where my friends live, spread out across the country. This morning I got an email from an old college friend saying she's moved to New York.

This is not about cooking, but it is. When I moved out here somehow slowly I lost touch with most of my friends back east, which is to say all of my friends except for the one who helped me come out here and those that are new. My old friends, I saw them all in September for a day or an hour, and since then we really haven't spoken. It's not the fault of the restaurant. It's three thousand miles of continent and times zones and the fact that when I'm not working they're either working or sleeping, and though everyone would love to get on a plane and come out to sunny California, no one has any money. I dreamed about a married friend last night. In college we lived together. We're both writers and we both blog. But we don't ever talk.

I'm trying to start trying again. Yesterday I called an old friend and we talked for a good hour. I'd seen him in New York and been in touch with him precisely once since then, at his count.

There's snow in my mind, but I'm not sure why. Is it my lifelong conditioning that the holidays be cold?

I get this way under a lot of stress. Stress....my mother asked me the other day why I was so stressed out over work these days. You Weren't When I Visited, she said. It's The HOLIDAYS I told her. I'll Have A Life In JANUARY But Right Now This Is My Life.

I wrote last night and it felt nice. There's so much editing, reading work to do for Fringe, maybe something else coming up too. I'd sort of like to go to a reading again one of these days...The Stephen Elliot piece in the Chronicle yesterday made me homesick for the company of writers.

Can't say for sure but it looks like I might see snow yet. But only because of sad things...

it's almost over...

(or is it?)

We don't do our laundry (so what are we wearing then?)
We don't eat at home, but if we do get to it takes us two days to do the dishes from our morning coffee.
We talk on the phone in stores, as we walk, in between spaces where we put the phones away and maybe crank the music and put our heads down and try to muscle through.
We don't do our chores. We don't make the bed.
We barely sleep.
Our moods oscillate. We are happy and we are tired and we are weary and we are thinking of a hot shower, or a full meal, or how we need to set up our station already but we need to do these eight other things first, yeah?
We haven't bought your xmas presents yet.
We sort of hate xmas.

We know this will all be over after xmas, after new year's. In a week? But each day is so much fuller than a day should be.

We wait. Busy busy busy wait.

Last night at the restaurant we sold seventy five desserts and when my coworker tallied up the amounts and told us we all sort of stopped and tried to take that in. Things are changing. Always changing.

Today I tried to do my xmas shopping and walked around the Haight for a while, bought some really funny gifts for a friend. I'm cooking my xmas gifts for the fam tonight and poaching the quince that's been in my fringe for like two months now. Perhaps it will be finished by the time I go to bed. I'm going to try to get some writing done in the hopes that it will improve my mood a lil. Overly meditative. I get weird these days when I'm not working because I've been working insane hours every day so when I'm not working then what is left of me? What should I be doing?

I spent a good ten minutes trying to think about what my quince would be like if I didn't put sugar in the poaching liquid because I'd just used up all my white sugar. I had brown sugar. Honey. 10x. I seriously almost called my sous chef to ask her what to do but I thought she would just laugh at me. I went through the cupboards but nobody had anything sweet. How can I live with people who don't have sugar? I finally snapped out of it and walked cutie pie down to the corner store so now I'll never know what would have happened.

Some things, they're just beginning. It's a weird transition time. Right now I would really like to be in NYC. That feels very strange. I think it's time for me to drive out to Napa and go to Dean and Deluca's. And pretend that when I walk outside I'll be in Soho. But I don't think that'll work. Maybe I'll just hang out at Arinell's more. That actually made me feel like I'd fled east...

new york, day two

Thank you to all New Yorkers and ex-New Yorkers for your wonderful suggestions.






So I said the pretzel croissant was all right. I forgot to mention the part where on day two I woke up and I had a breakfast destintion all planned out but really...I just kinda wanted another pretzel croissant. It's like how I felt about zaatar the morning after. Sometimes things just take a day to be brilliant to you. I *almost* bought another more than once that day...but I ended up with something even more instructionally interesting.

From the beginning, however: I woke up in my friend's dorm room at a too-early hour and due to my not having coffee hopped on a Brooklyn bound train. Figured out somewhere around Schermerhorn Street things were not quite right. My farmer was waiting for me, all dolled up in a pretty dress, by the time I got to West 4th, and we got the last available table in Patisserie Claude. Croissant for me, roll of cake for my friend. My croissant is buttery and flaky, and the coffee is good although I am initially skeptical, and we sit in the too-hot bakery amidst the other people who have no work obligations, maybe because it is Rosh Hashanah and the whole city seems to be free, and we tell each other the big news. I haven't seen her since February. She's one of those people I love so fiercely that we can't stop hugging, we find little excuses to touch one another, and as we walk down Christopher Street afterward I stop and take her hands in mind. I Have To Tell You Something. I tell her all about how I Love New York Again.

We both know what this means, and we get there, as I take a look at my notebook full of pastry suggestions and decide that if we walk down Spring Street we will hit three of my selections. The Hudson Valley House, one day...in whatever town I can afford. I've been making calculations based upon this house for years now. Maybe I'll Be Bi-Coastal, I say, a sigh, San Francisco a kink in all my well laid plans. But not even San Francisco can take that upstate house from me. It's in my blood, or something {and I do have relatives buried in the cemetery in Wappingers Falls}.

On the bakery tour, I fall in love with Balthazar, which is so adorably European and otherwordly, but we're too stuffed from breakfast so instead we muscle past the hostess and stare at the pastries and I decide to save it for next time. Just a little further down the street is button-cute Ceci Cela, with the most luscious looking glazed puff pastry and pear tartlets I have seen Ever. Jewelboxes glinting in the sun. But I'm still too full for something so large, so settle for a financier, which is smaller in size. Almondy and brown buttery and fine, but as we walk around the corner arguing about which way is uptown I'm longing for the puff pastry.

My farmer demands real food and she kind of wants French, so when we stumble upon Cafe Gitane it's great. I'm wearing my Harlem shirt and when the cute server comments I mumble about how I used to live in Brooklyn. My farmer orders a lentil-cranberry-walnut and smoked trout salad, which she succeeds in making me try. And like, despite my mistrust of cold foods and suspicion of smoked fish. Seriously good. I was more than happy with my cucumber mint yogurt salad dusted with rose petals, topped with a mound of hummus and perfectly toasted warm pita points that were faint echoes of Aziza's wonderfulness. I *did* kind of want a lil sumac on my salad, and a dash more rose, but it seemed outside the lit of reasonable requests.
Sometimes you can sit in silence with people and it's better than talking. Sometimes it's okay that someone is three thousand miles from you because they love what they're doing and they worked so hard to get there, and since you love them you know it's for the best, even if your heart is jealous.

After lunch we walk to one more bakery, the Build A Green Bakery/Birdhouse endeavor. I almost buy another pretzel croissant, which, it's worth noting, is fifty cents cheaper at the 1st Ave./13th St. Green outpost than the actual City Bakery. I also almost buy a giant cookie, but instead go for the miso plum cake and stash it in my bag for the long bus ride home. My farmer catches a cab uptown and we try to say goodbye. Too many hugs. Kisses. Promises. I shuffle off to my old place of employment to use the Zagat guide and get directions.


I walked up to Kalustyan's and almost bought so many things. Reminisced about my friends' old Murray Hill apartment and nights spent wanting so many things. I'd walked so far that I was trying to remember the quickest way back to a subway without walking the ten or so more blocks uptown to Grand Central but couldn't recall and ended up in Herald Square catching the F to Canal, where it was just two exactly and I was going to have to wait an hour for the bus.

But at Canal you can catch the JMZ, and if you go one or two stops you're back on the Lower East Side which is not all that far from Doughnut Plant and though I've already got a pastry in my bag for the bus I think some sugar and caffeine will get me out of the so-tired-I'm-going-to-pass-out and back into happy. Doughnut Plant is smaller than I expected, at least the retail side. I inspect the doughnuts and ask the man: peach or blueberry jelly? There's a note that explains they've started making their own jams and jellies. Blueberry, he says, then grabs a fresh rack from the back room and turns out he's been a baker, too, so we discuss the life. Kitchens. I take a bunch of photos and leave, tearing into my doughnut on the walk toward Chinatown. Square doughnut. Blueberry Jelly. Vanilla Bean Glaze. I'm not expecting the way the glaze flakes apart onto my hands as I eat. I've never actually *liked* a jelly doughnut before, certainly not the Dunkies version, but the blueberry jelly is wonderful and falling all over my hands. I've got no napkin so I'm licking it up and continuing to eat and stumbling closer to Chinatown. I'm revived. I'm in love again. I can't wait to come back.

Lest you forget I still had the miso plum cake to eat. If there had been more plums...mountains of plums! As it was, the cake alone was kind of crumbly-dry and hard to eat, but when eaten with the juicy plums it was heaven. I sort of resisted eating it for a few hours because I had that doughnut aftertaste in my mouth and didn't want to ruin it. But the cake was so intriguing, and the whole time I kept eating it I couldn't stop thinking about my upside down cake dilemma. What else was the miso cake but another form of that (well, I'm sure it wasn't baked upside down, but what is the seed behind the idea? what shape does the form take?)? I didn't have to make something I didn't like. Even if it was Chez Panisse. Even if it always sold well.
After all that, I went home and ate BBQ and was then convinced into going for ice cream to JP Licks. I got my favorite choice from there: oatmeal cookie yogurt with caramel sauce. But I also asked to try a new flavor: noodle kugel. It was amazing. I'm going to have to figure out how they did it from the tiny tasting spoon bite I had. Milky, cinnamony, tiny shards of noodles.

What's Kugel? my friends all asked.
It's A Jewish Food...I said.

doughnut plant, i miss you so

don't don't don't let's start

i got a weak heart

&i don't get around how you get around

I tried out Eagle Donuts today, on Mission 2-3 blocks after Cesar Chavez. It didn't get much press on Chowhound, but it was one of what, two, places in SF proper. I went with a maple old fashioned, which was lighter than the one from All Star. I should have gotten a yeast doughnut also for comparison's sake, but they didn't look so good.

I've been craving doughnuts. Ever since I finally found Doughnut Plant. I checked and of course they don't ship doughnuts...which means that there's just no way to get them and they're little pieces of heaven. And the only way to get close to them, of course, unless this Bob's place delivers that kind of insane goodness, is to learn how to make my own doughnuts.

Doughnuts. Malted vanilla ice cream. Sometimes you just can't stop thinking about something that is completely inaccessible to you. How can I get them? Where can I get them?

In all my free time, hah. NYC report...almost ready.

new york: day one

Day 1: Momofuku Ssam, Greenmarket, City Bakery, Il Laboratorio del Gelato, Gravy, White Horse Tavern.

Momofuku Ssam: Very polished and quiet. Hard to imagine the place bustling with foodie types and chefs, but then they do a lot more at dinner than they seem to do at lunch. I really wanted to go here because of all the foodie buzz, the Beard nomination, etc etc...and because of all the places I wanted to check out in New York it was the only slightly affordable one. I got a ssam with chicken, white kimchi, pickled shitakes, edamame and whatever else it came with. My friend got the pork rice bowl. My ssam was super messy. and kind of huge. and fairly fun. The shitakes were really good. The kimchi kind of made me nervous. The Tablehopper has a way better review of Momofuku Ssam, but then she had a giant pork feast.

We walked over to Union Square where I demanded we see the Greenmarket even though Dale, my adventure buddy for the afternoon, was quick to point out the SF farm markets were probably better. Apples and pears, same as here, but better apples and adorable Seckel pears. He got apple cider, which was a lil tangy and not very complex. Then he declared me an Honorary Jew, even though I met only half of his criteria, it being Rosh Hashana and all.

How is it that I never went to the City Bakery while I worked in Union Square? Was it not there? Or was I just too busy selling books? Either way I suppose it's a good thing, because the place would have been dangerous to my wallet. Not really feeling all that hungry after the ssam I went for the classic: pretzel croissant. A slightly pretzel-shaped croissant with toasty sesame seeds and a liberal sprinkling of salt on top...born to confuse the eater (is it breakfast or snack?) and infuriate the french. My friend snitched a piece and pronounced it all right. The general consensus was good croissant, curious about all the hype. I think I might have even passed the judgment of "it's all right" before we slid back onto 18th and took a lil walk upon my insistence to someplace I really wanted to go.

Yes, we went and just looked at Gramercy Tavern. Mostly so I could see if they were open for lunch and how costly such a thing might be, but...yeah...it was fairly geeky and I'll be the first to admit it.

From there we hopped a train to Delancey Street for some gelato. I'm quite glad I went to Il Laboratorio del Gelato, but the counter help was a dick! They had some kind of ice cream made with mastic, and I wanted to know what was in it. It's all gone, we just sold the last of it, was his response, even though that wasn't my question. I tried to explain again how I was just curious, but when he still appeared to be functioning not quite up to speed I figured it was either give up or reach across the counter and shake him by his dishwasher's coat. I mean, how many people know what mastic is in the first place? Sheesh.

Ice cream weirdness aside, we shared a cup of honeydew sorbet, strawberry gelato and honey-lavender gelato. The strawberry was surprisingly good. Likewise on the taste factor of the sorbet, though it was a lil icy and needed a fresh spin. I always feel totally awkward in that situation...I want to tell them, and it is true, but I know I'd be rolling my eyes if it were me behind the counter. Anyway...the honey lavender was decent. I'm just really picky about the flavor. The entire experience was revolutionary in that, here in SF, I've had gelato a couple times recently and been very disappointed...and those times aside I don't think I've had it since Italy maybe years ago. So it's not that I don't like gelato, per se...it's just I haven't had the right kind.

While meandering toward the subway we even saw a cake tag! {yes, I've got pictures} Stuffed to the gills we retired to Carroll Gardens for some sitting around the giant kitchen, talking about crushes, and watching my friend's grad school videos. Brooklyn felt low and small, familiar enough with its landscape and people. My friend tried to convince me that if I'd lived in South Brooklyn rather than North, I would have stayed.

Perhaps this is the point in the post where I explain briefly that my entire life I wanted nothing more to live in New York and be a famous writer. I wanted to be the Diane Keaton character in Manhattan; I wanted to be Dorothy Parker and co. at the Algonquin; I wanted to be Allen Ginsberg. I grew up going to New York a couple times a year for shopping and whatnot, saw all the major art shows all through college. When my New Yorky Vassar friends would tell me I didn't really know New York I'd get all confused...

Life for me in New York most closely resembled The 6ths song "I've Got New York." At first it was intense and hard and exciting and then it slowly ground down at absolutely everything I thought I wanted was slowly taken from me. For a couple of years I went back, barely, through grit teeth and tensed muscles. My friends were still there. Every neighborhood held bad memories or false hopes. Then finally I went back (in October of last year and February of this year) and it was neutral. How nice to be free of all those experiences...that said, I still won't go to Times Square...

Finally {and is it being 3000 miles away, or having a whole other career, or growing older, or being unable to take it for granted} it's over. It's official. I Love New York (Again). All of my memories are open now. The horrible, hard times are there but so are the times from my youth, from college, from when I lived there. So many of the people I love most are New York people and I knew they'd be happy to hear this.

When I took her hand the next morning and looked into her eyes, told her I had big news she needed to hear, my farmer did something special: Now You Can Love It Like A Real New Yorker, she said. You Know What It Means. You've Seen The Best And The Worst.


Oodles of awesome food, sweet and savory. Key epiphanies about my life. Becoming an Honorary Jew and a Real New Yorker...could it get any better? Well, I only walk myself into blood sugar oblivion and am saved Simpsons-style by doughnuts, but that's the next day...

Philz Coffee, 24th + Folsom

Thank heavens for my caffeine addiction and my mother's desire to take a walking tour of the Mission back in July...otherwise I might never have found Philz. The location's all screaming bright awnings, Mission murals, people hanging on the streets. Outside there's an assortment of mismatched chairs and plants. Inside is coffee for serious types. Twenty blends of coffee, store-bought Arabic pastries (I keep thinking I'll offer to make them some homemade kunefe, baklava and muhallabeya), muffins, cookies.

Philz is packed right now with hipster kids, scrabble players, queer couples, writers. I've seen ambulance crews and cops pile in for a shift rush. Once, a boy in a dress swept the sidewalk and watered the plants, and he didn't even work there. It's so writerly, Philz. Everywhere there are outlets, cords, things to trip on or bump into. You walk up to the counter and pick your blend, then pay at the register. My first time there we waited a good five minutes wondering why we weren't getting any coffee before Phil explained the system to us. Today I asked what a blend called New Manhattan tasted like, and was told that Phil said "it tastes like new downtown San Francisco." According to the wall chart, that meant a medium roast with lots of busy flavors and bright aromas. So I went with the Philtered Soul, a medium dark blend with chocolate notes that is seriously close to heaven.

And today is the perfect day for writing, baking, and knitting. I'm working on the New York update and a new piece of flash fiction.

back, and back to work

I'm back...writing from work.

San Francisco is doing her best flirting with me now...it's sunny and I just bought prickly pears from Yerena. I got a ride from a friend last night and seeing the FH people wandering in at six thirty this morning was like getting back to my kitchen family.

But what I wanted to say is this: I love New York. Again.

{I never thought that I would. I'll tell you why, and what I ate, later.}

bakery list/local chocolates

My list of New York options is growing out of bounds of what one girl can possibly eat, but here it is, as the Chowhouds add and amend. Any comments? Anything I should see or do in the city I love to hate, other that the trip to my favorites the Strand + Dean and Deluca?


Balthazar Bakery
Buttercup
Chelsea Market/Amy's Bread
City Bakery
Doughnut Plant
Il Laboratorio del Gelato
Kee's Chocolates
Kyotofu
Madeleine Patisserie
Sugar Sweet Sunshine Bakery (LES)
Birdbath/Build a Green Bakery (West Village, East Village)
Black Hound (East Village)
Ceci-Cela (Soho)
Levain (UWS)
Bouchon Bakery (UWS)


Dinner hopefully at either p*ong or Momofuku Ssam.

And would I pass up the chance to visit a Somerville chocolatier in his chocolate workshop and stalk the elusive orchid root here?

The Beehive is tonight. I have been waiting at least nine months for this restaurant to open and I'm so very glad I get to go. !!

it's midnight and my. stomach. hurts

Tonight I found out a piece of my food writing is going to be published online in a few weeks. The journal had been really interested back in April or thereabouts and dropped the ball. While there are a lot of things I like within the piece it's sort of a negative piece in a lot of ways--definitely not a favorite with the writing group--if an important piece for me. It's strange to publish something I don't feel like I LOVE...although I do feel it's important, at least personally (though that is not a great reason)...it speaks to a lot of things I feel about this industry, and it's very of a certain time in my life, and it's perhaps challenging to think of it out of that time.

Nervousness and listmaking. My vacation is almost half over and there is so much left to do. It's so wonderful to see each person I get to see, but it's also an obligation:

do not leave anyone out.

So people want to see me again or have coffee or go driving but there's no time.

To go to New York or not. I will want to have gone by the time I'm back in California. It's just a lot to plan. Right now I'm researching bakeries and whatnot I want to hit up and I still don't really have dinner plans {which I should just make, right} and it's like...this is my vacation...like, relax already. The list so far:


il laboratorio del gelato
buttercup cakery
city bakery
doughnut plant
kee's chocolates
amy's bread/chelsea market
balthazar
kyotofu


Boys night out on the town Saturday to check out the new club, but it was all posturing and bored girls, me included. Been spending lots of time lately with people who remind me of myself too much and it's strange to see my reaction mirrored in someone else's face.

You can accuse me of being too intense, and you'd probably be right

I went to Oleana tonight. There are a lot of things I want to say about Oleana...and Aziza as well while we're discussing Turkish-North African cuisine...

{and I've tried to write already about Aziza a couple of times but it doesn't come out in a way that satisfies me as being accurate, and then there's sort of a lil rant I'm not sure if I should get into even though it really bothered me and it still bothers me a week later}

so for now there is only the things we ate at Oleana:

padron peppers with fleur de sel, yogurt
warm buttered humus with basturma, olives
zaatar focaccia
fideos with chickpeas and chard
spinach falafel with greens, beets, tahini
crispy zaatar-lemon chicken with turkish cheese pancake, greens
swordfish with eggplant-macaroni timbale
goat's milk ice cream (made with sahleb!!) with blueberry jellies, blueberry sauce, rose petal jam
umm ali with peaches and peach jam, honey pot de creme


and Aziza:

grilled flatbreads with mediterannean spreads
giant lima beans with roasted tomatoes, feta, fresh zaatar
chicken basteeya


There were so many familiar taste memories in those desserts. Not surprising-many of the components I'd tasted before, or at least variations on a theme.


I'm nervous about everything that happens when I get back to San Francisco, but that is another list to be made. It's easy to be here and it's easy to slip into things.Being back here is so emotional. Every street corner in Somerville is the scene of secrets, fights, attraction, breakups, longing. It's so marked in so many ways that diminish the abstractions I seek in SF. I moved away for food? I start to think...and it all seems so trite.

after all my crazy dreams, everything was beautiful

The Tenderloin is the perfect place to go when you feel like you're in a noir. Everyone is addicted to something and you're only addicted to coffee, and you wait for your friends and then you talk about work and what the gossip is and you are careful not to talk about women. You think about how the Tenderloin is kind of like Downtown Crossing kind of like Roxbury, and how many times you walked through the Common at night, and how familiarity breeds comfort but it's always a little weird to be queer in places like this.

SF is finally starting to feel like home, at least a little bit. I drive around on autopilot and I am beginning to have lil rituals here. I mostly love the view from my neighborhood, whenever I leave my house. I can see the whole of downtown right before I descend into it and it always feels so inviting. Like I'm about to be hugged (except, I don't really like hugging). I love that view almost as much as I love being down by the FB, with its perfect rows of palm trees in front and amazing sunrises over the Bay Bridge that almost making getting up at 430 worth it.


Was down there today for the Tuesday market today--the man at Alfieri told me I could freeze those grapes I can't stop buying. Got eggplant, cilantro, tomatoes and salad greens. Then a Flavor Heart pluot from FH that was delicious and drippy. And from Blossom Bluff some august red nectarines and tiny prune plums that I thought were gong to be wonderful but were in fact kind of mealy. I tried their peaches and I was super not impressed. Good thing my nectarine fan club is growing.

I'm super excited about going to the Berkeley Saturday market the Saturday after this one. I'm dragging my friend's ass across the bay on BART and we are going in search of the fresh zaatar that La Tercera is supposed to sell and then we are going back to SF so that I can work for a few hours, and then back to Berkeley to Chez Panisse, and I think she is really excited about getting to see it. I'm a little looking forward to it, too. There's something about paying for a nice meal yourself (or at least part of it).

And on the subject of food, I have figured out (or re-remembered) that I want to go to Prune when I am in New York. And after reading the spread on pastry chefs in Bon Appetit I kind of want to go to Room 4 Dessert (because who can resist a man tonguing an offset spatula?) or p*ong...and of course I need to put a bakery roundup together. Because certainly, if we're walking off a really nice meal, we might as well be searching out snackies for later.

jam-time!

I figured out what I want to do with those pluot-plums in the freezer, and the wad of rose petals I ganked from the Albany shoreline trail and my old Fruitvale house. Plum-rose jam!

I haven't made jam in a long time, not since culinary school when we made buckets of jam, any and all flavors. Some of them are still sitting around my Somerville house. Some were given away as presents. Not sure when I will get around to this jam, but likely I'll try to get a sourdough starter going so that my the time I'm jammed up there will be good toast. I am such a bread-brat these days; I only eat Acme.

My favorite jam excursion is from my days on the farm, when I went across the river to my favorite farmer EVER's house and we had gallons of strawberries from the PFP and we made jam all day long, some with pectin and some without. I'm sure we talked about love, and why we love the wrong people or love too soon, too long, or without giving away all of ourselves. But now I only remember the jam.

I've got three fresh burns from last week as a reminder not to work distracted, and worked distracted all day.


I just got to say to a friend Autumn leaves and apples!

This is why I'm going to Boston in October (and hopefully NYC, the city I love to hate, as well). I make up little lists that go something like apples, apple cider, apple cider doughnuts, apples, ICA, Oleana, East Coast Grill, Lydia Shire stories, Herrell's, Harvard square, crunch of leaves
or
finding the Doughnut Plant for real, McNulty's, Bklyn, Grand Central, the 6 train, my two favorite places on Broadway ever, will I ever eat at Gramercy Tavern, I could go to Babbo, maybe I'll go be a line cook like Bill Buford, still haven't been to Cafe Lalo, or the Cloisters, Spuyten Duyvil, did I really ever live here.

God I love apples and I'm so nervous they won't have my apples here.

Thinking of doing utterly crazy things, specifically two, but they are secrets.


No more cooking with herbs. Get over this lavender, rose geranium, lemon verbena, slight thyme kick. Find something else and it better not be a spice.

Ai, forgot to make Chez Panisse reservations. I'm gong to have to put Chez Panisse in my cell phone and that is kind of sad. Determined also to go to another fine restaurant while Leah's here...Where I have been in this town: A16, Delfina, Frisson, Jardiniere.

you said the world was magic i was wide eyed and laughing

Crushes...just when you forswear off the forever, decide you're deluded, you get a glimmer of hope faint down the line, and you're back on the train. This is proof that despite y tough guy act I really am a romantic at heart. Sssh.

Things that are stressing me out right now, despite the fabulous SF location:

I live in a creepy spider filled basement (but only for 2 more weeks).
I haven't written in 2 weeks.
I have not been working much or cooking much of anything. Apparently now I get weird when I don't cook as well.
Crap to deal with, but no internet connection.
The Leica dream... It showed me another way to see. To create. To give. It made me really happy, and I went off into the San Francisco night with it. But I don't have a Leica, and I'm not going to get one anytime soon if ever...so what, then, what?
Things are at maximum capacity at the FB...there's not much more I can do without another pair of hands or another day. That should make me happy and not stressed out. We'll work on that.

Important anniversaries that are probably also contributing to malaise:
The birthday.
One year ago I met _____, who changed my life immensely but will never know it.
Just before that time I lost most of my Boston friend base.
And after that I started at Sonsie.
Four and a half months ago I moved west.
Two weeks ago I moved out of Oakland.

That last one was really hard. People are different out here and though I've assimilated some I still don't have a community out here and I still don't get it right sometimes. When I first came, it was like a new set of rules every other day. I got NYC and I got Boston and I got Potown but the Bay area had never fit me right. I don't understand the intense but brief connections I seem to make here. With writers in bars or girls in cafes or poolhall players or neighbors or FB types. I don't understand the paranoia and gossip, or the strange generosity. It all ebbs and flows and, though I think mostly I forget the weirdness and just get my things done, it pops up still. Unsettled.

Trying to figure out how to give {better, more, and only what I truly value}.
Old patterns have been cropping up. Things that have faded into the past. Lots of talk about Miette, for one. What I'm supposed to do with that information I'm still not sure.

Right now, though, I wish the ice cream fairy would show up with some goodies. Still haven't eaten y dinner, but I' warming up some Delfina leftovers now. I can't get up at 5 and get through the next 2 days. I'm just not ready...all this time off, all these distractions. This weekend's gonna kick my ass.

beginnings, endings

I have reconciled with the chocolate cherry cake. It has been much maligned in these pages of late, and so I'm glad that we have come to terms, because people really do like chocolate and cherries and flourless chocolate cake substances, even if they're not especially captivating to me.

When I originally made the cake I used David Lebovitz's recipe from Ripe for Dessert, substituting cherry conserve for the candied cherries, and I think this was actually my favorite version, but it didn't sell well at all. Next step, once cherries arrived of course, was cherries cooked in syrup with David's cake...too moist, and too dominated by chocolate.

The next step was to find a basic flourless chocolate cake recipe and add in the cherries. The chocolate was less dominant (actually only used cocoa powder), but it was too challenging to handle.

For the birthday cake it was requested I use up some of the ancient, pre-divorce Guittard semisweet from the Berkeley Bowl (there's a Bay area mouthful). I took (if you love me, buy me a digital scale) approx. 2/3 cup of the Guittard chips and approx. 3/4 of the bar of Scharffen Berger 70%. The blend of chocolates worked really well, ad the Guittard tamed down the winey intensity of the Scharffen Berger and allowed the cherries to really come through. A much better balance of flavors. It was really appreciated by the party guests. Which was nice, yknow, cause it didn't really look like much. Flourless cake or any souffle like cake tends to look like crap. I left it unadorned. We ate it with chocolate mousse and ice cream. It's been a very, very long times since I had a non-Sonsie chocolate mousse.

However, it is still too moist. There really isn't any liquid, aside from what little the cherries ooze out...maybe if I make it again I shall drain them well...Not really sure how to correct that otherwise. Cake being too moist, what an odd problem.

I've got lots of odd problems right now. Lots of things on the brain. I took a long bike ride tonight through Fruitvale and again was reminded of Poughkeepsie. There's even a building on International that looks just like the old mental health hospital on Route 9 right across from the CIA. Poughkeepsie, maybe I will see you in the fall? When there's not much growing on the farm except for bitter greens and my farmer friend is tired. But nevermind that. I'll never get to Poughkeepsie without a car. So it will be my last meal was here, and my last adventure was the chocolatier. Poughkeepsie. I've got to get back. Maybe the farmer will fetch me? Bus to New York and the the familiar train ride from platform 36? The places we love aren't always pretty and who can possibly understand my deepest love for Poughkeepsie, New York?

The east is coming to me, in packages and in persons, all month next month. I want to smell the salt on the water; I want to feel the heat heavy in the air.

Lately I've been thinking about intentionality and cooking. What we are cooking out of. What is on our minds during the actual act. I'm trying to cook only from positive places. It's a struggle to always hold on to that love and compassion for strangers. Cooking is giving away the best parts of yourself. So is writing, but you can't see words or their effect on people, and so it's almost still your guarded secret. In cooking the things you make are real, tangible, and to the outside eye not defined by or created by anything per se. But it really should come from the best place, because otherwise there's just so much heartache in the business, why bother?

Cooking. Making me a nicer person? I dunno, you tell me.

apples, big and otherwise

Did you listen to Fresh Air on NPR today? Russ Parsons was on and it was all about seasonal fruit! I learned that Red Delicious apples are made so red by the very thing that makes them taste bitter and not at all how an apple should taste. And new apple breeds (heirlooms or hybrids?) started coming into popularity--beginning with the Fuji, bred in Japan and then trans-atlanticized to our shores so we could grow them and sell them to Asians, in the day before anyone cared about local food--and people could really begin to taste apples again. Apples that tasted like apples.

I think my first trip back east will be in time for apple picking. But my cute new dogwalker just sent me this article which made me want a different sort of apple. New York New York, the bitter apple. My love-hate relationship's been turning sweet lately as I miss the idiosyncrasies of that city.


This morning my friend Dale invited me to join goodreads.com. Because I am a sucker for books and literature, I did, and invited many of my friends to join, thinking it would be really sweet if they did but believing none of them would. Over half of them did! And many sent me emails or called me. One even accused me of writing about all of these incomprehensible things here--blah blah blah buttercream, blah blah blah chef-name-drop, blah blah blah pate sucree. But then we talked about maybe meeting up...in New York.


Today I connected with my friends through literature. Wouldn't it be wonderful if that happened every day?

what is a chef?

What do chefs look like? What do they do?

Today in Sur La Table I presented my fancy dish towels and OXO cherry pitter to the cashier and asked for the professional discount. Yes, certainly, he replied, asking for my name and punching away loudly at the computer. Then he asked me if I could verify where I was working, because they had me in the computer but not as professional level. Hmmm, I said. I had business cards in my wallet with proof of Boston-area pastry professionalism, but nothing out here. I work in the Ferry Building and they know me so they just give me the discount I said. I didn't add that I'm usually wearing whites at the time, so (clearly) a chef. I flashed him my business card and he upgraded me in the computer.

Then I went across the street to Stonehouse to get some fancy olive oil and balsamic vinegar for my mother's birthday, because their dark balsamic is so good it's going to make me have to stop pretending I don't like balsamic vinegars (well okay I like them reduced down, with cream, such a baker, sheesh). And the cute fag behind the counter tells me he thought I was here for the bike shop and not the Stonehouse products. I tell him about Sur La Table.

While at Ici having lovely ice cream--chicory chocolate chip and gingersnap which was lemony and bright if a touch too grainy on the mouth--I thought about my day. (And it's a good thing I'm moving to SF soon or I'd go to Ici every day. I LOVED it.)

When I was a kid I fell in love with a profession with no money, vague hints of success, and no clear career path. I was going to be a writer! It was marginally better than what I'd hit on before, an actress. As I finished high school and put myself through the best college I could get into, I still thought I'd be a writer. I thought it would happen if I read the right books, if I made friends and mentors of my teachers. One day it's just happen and then there I'd be, a writer. If I worked on lit mags, if I tried to get published, if I stayed up till three a.m. writing a story. All of these more benchmarks on the way to writer-dom. But if I went ahead and got my MFA, then I'd be one leap closer to the real thing. If I got a job as an editorial assistant and lived in Brooklyn or Queens, commuted to Simon and Schuster or Scholastic or Penguin Putnam or, my favorite, Vintage Contemporaries (division of Random House), I'd also be on my way. I collected books and authors, kept (and still keep) annual reading lists. I read the writing guides. I sought out queer writers and invited one of them to read at my college. Then I got out of college. I lived in New York. I worked a desk job, 9-5 and struggled severely with all of those questions you have when you're 22. I wanted all these things in life, but how was I supposed to get them doing this? Here? No one I knew in New York was really happy...or doing anything we wanted to be doing...we were all just sort of hanging on and trying to get ahead.

I was accepted into the MFA program at Emerson College and moved back to Boston.

I learned a few things at Emerson, but one of the main ideals that became my practice during my time there was this: claim yourself. Claim yourself as a writer because the world isn't going to do you any favors. All hundred-plus of us at Emerson were geeks, nerds, budding poets or screenplay writers, essayists or novelists. Most of us worked full or part time. Most of us were female, and white, and though this has changed since I began, only a handful of us were queer. It was challenging enough to write stories with a different voice and from a different place than my peers, but while living out the MFA dream I realized it wasn't going to get me where I wanted to go. It might land me an editorial assistant gig, if I took some publishing classes. It would let me teach as soon as I published something hot and earned a reputation. But the MFA wouldn't make me a writer. It gave me time, and a room full of peers. But I was still going to have to make my way as a writer alone.

Halfway through my MFA I decided to go to culinary school, because I was getting old enough to realize I wanted a real, steady career and I didn't want to graduate and sit behind another desk. A couple weeks later there I was, in my first professional kitchen. In school, the pastry girls didn't really understand what I was doing, dashing from cooking class in Cambridge across the river to writing class in Boston. At Sonsie, during my last semester of grad school, no one got it either. I handed in my thesis, I'd say. I'm finished. I have my masters. I'd only get stares. They didn't have to ask me why I was getting my masters if I was a pastry cook...or why I was being a pastry cook if what I wanted was to write books. The duality was outside their comprehension or realm interest. In every kitchen I entered, I had to make the same claim: I'm a writer. And, yes, a baker. A chef.

Claim yourself. No one else is going to do it for you.

The expectations are similar for chefs. What does a chef look like? Not like this.

What does a chef do? What does a chef wear? Are bakers really chefs anyway? I call myself a baker and I don't think it's a pejorative word. But some people do. At work sometimes I fall into the trap of thinking that my experience is more valid or more strong than other people's experience because I've worked in restaurants. This is egotistical whether or not it's true. My industry is pretty hot right now, and the restaurant scene is the scene. Those of us who work at tiny, independent bakeries, or for caterers, or for bread-makers, or for farmers, or for ourselves...well, we're somehow less than. Other than.

We are taught that restaurants are sexy, if a little scary. Chefs are (usually)Male. Older. White. Straight. Cooks are younger version of Chefs. There is a mystique and culture to being a chef that gets represented to the general public by Anthony Bourdain, Jamie Oliver, Tom Colicchio. Being queer in the kitchen is hard and it's something I haven't always been forthright about. Being a women in the kitchen, also tough sometimes. Being in the kitchen and having claim to a life outside the kitchen--being a writer in the kitchen--well, it makes you a little untrustworthy. A little suspect.

I'm outside the culture, but where am I? Do I call myself a baker, and with pride? I don't call myself a pastry chef, not comfortably. That would imply some amount of knowledge, skill, status, power, and income I just do not have right now. The girls at Frog Hollow want to call me "pastry chef extraordinaire." Especially when I purposefully drop things so they can try them. But I don't want that title. I'm not just a baker, not just a cook, although I do those things. I'm the girl running around with cherry juice stains on her hand, the girl the guys at the Berkeley farm market ask about the burns on her arms. I'm a writer, and a cook, but what to call myself, how to claim it? Short of wearing whites at all times, I can't dress the part. I'm a chef I tell them. I'm a professional but I don't look the part, whatever that might mean to whoever. Maybe I'll self-identify as a pastry sous chef. Almost a big name, covering the chef's ass at all times, powerful in her own right but without the pressure to prove an identification.

I'm going to go work on a story now, about someone who covets being a baker. It's hard to write about bakers from around the shadow of Raymond Carver's A Small, Good Thing. Because the last things I want to be is a bad imitation of Raymond Carver.